A disclaimer: I am ambivalent towards football. What is the beautiful game to so many has always been a beige pastime to me. Shall we watch City and Liverpool at the pub on Saturday? Yeah, sure. Shall I book us all table for the Euros? Well yeah, the England squad's the only good thing on these ashen isles. So when Netflix announced Beckham, a new docuseries that purported to pull back the curtain on the most culturally influential player that ever lived, I expected my interest to be on the milder end of things. Sue me!
But I was misguided. It's an honest, funny and often touching bird's-eye view of football's first family. You rarely get that sort of look in with a media profile that's so tightly controlled and curated. But of all Beckham's indelible moments – the intense beginnings of his marriage, the depression that came after that World Cup loss, Victoria Beckham insisting on her working-class roots despite being driven to school in an actual Rolls-Royce – it was a football shirt from his halcyon days that's really stuck. In fact, it may be the best thing in the entire series.
During the first leg of Beckham, we're treated to a very Netflix montage of his professional rise: talking heads reel off platitudes like “unstoppable” and “once in a generation”; the clips of ludicrous goals get choppier; things really start speeding up; EVERYBODY, THIS IS DAVID BECKHAM!!!!!!!! But something stands out in this medley: the Manchester United home shirt of the ‘97/’98 season. And it's not just me that noticed, either: since the Beckham docuseries landed, there's been a 4,000% uptick in Google searches for that exact shirt.
While we appreciate the skill level needed to lob a keeper from the halfway line, the ‘96/’98 kit was the true harbinger of an entire menswear phenomenon. Long-sleeved. Bright red. Slightly boxy. Geometrics that were on everything from trackies to the opening graphics of Channel 4 News. Without that shirt, there would've been no vintage football shirt revival. It harks back to a time before strips got streamlined and performance-driven, when audio companies sponsored world-class teams and football clubs leaned into gaudy branding as they were still learning to fully brand themselves. You don't really see kits like that anymore.
Granted, nostalgia is a comfort blanket. Liking old things isn't a particular novel phenomenon. But that particular kit pre-empted the fashion football shirts that came after – when menswear openly began to pilfer the aesthetic for aesthetes that have no real interest in the sport (another disclaimer: I am one of them). In April last year, everyman label Percival teamed up with old school kit retailer Classic Football Shirts, and the result was a remix of ‘90s shirts that sold out within minutes. KidSuper, the designer that held interim creative director at Louis Vuitton between the Abloh and Pharrell administrations, supercharged a vintage-looking football shirt with his signature candied colourway.
In 2023, dressing like a PE teacher circa ‘93 is a thing. The surge of grey marl sweat shorts and tucked in T-shirts and normie sneakers are all proof of that. But what trumps that is dressing like the stars of the era – and in the ’90s, nobody burnt brighter than a Premier League superstar. There's a cultural currency to it. British culture was football culture, and that particular Beckham shirt is a symbol of a very specific era in this country, an era when rival fans hated Manchester United (“because they were winning everything” says GQ's digital director Sam Parker, who supports Newcastle by the way).
Earlier this summer, I was sat on a broken picnic bench at a music festival in Lincolnshire. Opposite me was a friend who is a football completist; a man that can describe most big goals of the last 30 years in obsessive detail, and can recall the exact season of a particular kit. Dozens of people were bouncing around in the football kits of yore: a girl in her mid-20s wearing a Preston North End '96 shirt, a guy in an early noughties Aston Villa strip with Nike trackies, a group of people in old school Swindon shirts. None of them would be wearing that without the Manchester United grail of ‘96/’97 – and none of them came close.
